How do I help my high performers – Part 1
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With high performers, the question is always “What are you trying to help them with?” You’ll find 2 types of high performers in your team.
- People who have excellent skills, love their job and want to stay in role and be seen as a top performer. Their focus is on PERFORMANCE.
- People who are delivering excellent performance and are ambitious to do more and accelerate their career. Their focus is PROGRESSION.
This week we’re going to talk about developing and rewarding high performance. We’ll talk about development for progression next time.
Before you start thinking about development, ask some open questions to understand your high performer’s motivation and focus.
There are many perspectives on how to help a high performer develop even greater performance, and through our new Talent Manager articles we’ll address a range of them. For now, if you have a high performing individual who wants to stay in role, here are a few key things you can do.
- Recognise their efforts. It sounds really simple but often it is neglected when someone is working quietly away delivering good results time after time. Managers worry that praise is devalued if it’s constantly repeated – but you can lose people if they don’t feel valued. Sometimes it’s enough to just say it, sometimes you have to show it with concrete recognition. (And it’s not always about money, there are other ways of recognising people – an article on this later!). At the very least start by just saying it. It may help to think of it not as praise but instead as appreciation, which is equal to equal.
- Let them be better than you. Don’t be afraid to give appreciation to people who are doing something better than you could. The art of leadership is to gather a team of great performers, all of whom can do things better than you. Encourage them to show off their skills by teaching you and the team something!
- Let them decide and drive their own performance. Can you ask them to look out for meetings or conferences they could attend that would add value to their knowledge? Can you discuss their strengths and weaknesses with them and talk about how they’d like to use their strengths more? Can you give them a £500 personal training budget – because you trust them to sign off on training that will help them do their job even better?
- Invest time in them. Most managers invest far more time in their poor performers than in their high performers. Make time to sit down with a cup of coffee and a bun on a regular basis. Ask them about progress on their development plan, what are they learning, what opportunities should you look out for, that would help them learn and grow? Spend some time getting excited and positive with them!
- Treat them as your trusted adviser. At your catchups, also consider – what insights can they give you on what is going on, or needs attention? What information would you like to share with them, so they understand priorities and can support these with the team when you may not be there? Do you want to run ideas by them for their comments and input?
- Involve them in work that will give them a wider view. Can they come to a meeting with you and discuss this afterwards? Are there aspects of your work that they’d be interested in helping with?
- Use them as a role model. Can you give them responsibility for supporting other team members? Perhaps you could get learners to shadow them or observe them. Can you get learners to use them as a mentor- e.g. run proposed solutions by them to get expert insights, new perspectives and talk about how to handle tricky situations?
- Don’t forget that things change. Make sure that they know that just because they are focused on life balance or their current role now, it’s always possible to change their focus and go for progression. People aren’t jam jars – they don’t like to be labelled.
There is a lot you can do to help high performers who may not be focused on progression. Think about who the top performers are in your team and which of these strategies would work for them. How will you invest time and attention in them, so that they know they are valued?